Using @dfinity/agent in node.js

[icme]

Thanks to everyone above for the great commentary, really was nice to follow as I started troubleshooting not being able to load in my existing dfx principal via agent-js (I received the same different dfx and node principals as everyone else).

Since it did take me a bit of time to get through it all, hopefully these steps make it easier for those of you running into a similar issue (as of the time of this post).

Steps

1. Navigate to my .dfx identities → ~/.config/.dfx/identity
2. Create a new identity → mkdir local-testing; cd local-testing
3. Download quill since keysmith is now deprecated.
4. Test that quill is installed correctly → quill
5. Look up how to generate a key → quill generate --help
6. Generate a key and seed file → quill generate --pem-file identity.pem --seed-file seed.txt
7. Now implement Kyle’s code snippet below (copied from comment this post is replying to)

@kpeacock

const Identity = require("@dfinity/identity");
const hdkey = require("hdkey");
const fs = require("fs");

const { Secp256k1KeyIdentity } = Identity;

const bip39 = require("bip39");

const phrase = fs.readFileSync("seed.txt").toString().trim();

export const identityFromSeed = async (phrase) => {
  const seed = await bip39.mnemonicToSeed(phrase);
  const root = hdkey.fromMasterSeed(seed);
  const addrnode = root.derive("m/44'/223'/0'/0/0");

  return Secp256k1KeyIdentity.fromSecretKey(addrnode.privateKey);
};

identityFromSeed(phrase).then((identity) => {
  console.log(identity.getPrincipal().toString());
});

8. If you run this an have NodeJS version 17+, you will receive the following error coming from the hdkey library import → Error: error:0308010C:digital envelope routines::unsupported. The possible solutions for getting around this are here, the easiest of which is downgrading to node 16. (@kpeacock/sdk team can you provide a node 17+ solution? )
9. Now running the above node script and dfx identity get-principal should return the same identity! Yay!